A few days before the election circus in the US will start with the Iowa’s caucus, presidential candidate Ron Paul made a comment on the pending SOPA bill “They want to take over the Internet,” he said. “Can you imagine how much we’re going to be curtailed in the spreading of out information if we […]

[Cartoon first published circa 2005 etc.]
So uber-famous-corporate-blogger-ninja-rockstar Jerimiah Owyang blogged about The Golden Age of Tech Blogging being over. His colleague, my friend, Brian Solis doesn’t agree. Lots of other people are yakkin’ about it as well, it seems. I guess that’s a good thing. Here are my thoughts:
1. Time to quote Shirky YET AGAIN: “So for­get about blogs and blog­gers and blog­ging and focus on this — the cost and dif­fi­culty of publishing abso­lu­tely anything, … show all text

That’s right. We’re at the end of an important period. The tech blogosphere as we know it, is over.
Four Trends Show the End of this Era: Like the film industry, the Golden Era is the emergence period, when fresh innovation in a new medium is born. New techniques, revolutionary content, and different business models emerge as innovators pioneer a new medium. I first had this discussion with Chris Saad, which triggered some thinking on my end. I asked some of the foremost tech blogger of their … show all text

This story has never been told, and it’s incredibly important to tell it today; it’s a perfect example of what might come to be if SOPA becomes law — a shoot first, question later mentality held by GoDaddy. Want to know what the world would be like under SOPA? Read on. Sometime in 2009, Weebly was starting to gain momentum. We hadn’t yet achieved the scale we have today, but we were hosting a couple million websites — certainly a decent size by any measure. We registered weebly.com with GoDa… show all text

The Federal Aviation Administration doesn't allow Kindles and iPads to be on during takeoffs and landings over the issue of possible interference with aircraft navigation or communication systems. A visit to a testing lab shed light on whether a hazard really exists.

It’s going to get worse before it gets better for domain registration company Go Daddy. Yesterday, we reported that Go Daddy had reversed its decision to support SOPA. Its customer service reps are even taking to the phones to beg you to keep your domains with the company.
It looks like these PR moves to save face, and business, are completely futile. According to TheDomains, 21,054 domains were transferred away from Go Daddy on Friday alone. At $6.99 a pop, that would make for a loss of $147,1… show all text

At this point quite a few internet companies have protested H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in creative ways. Held by many to be the worst thing to ever happen to the Internet if it passes, SOPA would makes it really easy for copyright holders to force sites offline that they think are offending, among other things.
While the judiciary vote has been delayed until next year, the list revealing the companies who support the act was released yesterday, and many startups, such as Reddi… show all text

From Twitter – How Facebook is planning to sell your timeline. https //t.co/EKJvoEgp

Who’s officially on the record backing what could be the worst thing to ever happen to the internet? All of these companies listed below. Don’t take our word for it—this list comes straight from Congress. Just FYI. More »

The U.S. Congress is considering the Protect IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). MythBuster Adam Savage says that if these sweeping pieces of legislation pass, the U.S. will join the likes of China and Iran in censoring the Internet.

We’re pleased to announce that we have negotiated a significant and mutually beneficial revenue agreement with Google. This new agreement extends our long term search relationship with Google for at least three additional years.
“Under this multi-year agreement, Google Search will continue to be the default search provider for hundreds of millions of Firefox users around the world,” said Gary Kovacs, CEO, Mozilla.
“Mozilla has been a valuable partner to Google over the years and we look forward… show all text

Over the past few years, a bunch of web-based marketplaces have gotten popular – Etsy, Kickstarter, AirBnb, to name a few. Many of these business ideas had been tried before but are succeeding only now.
When a trend like this emerges, it’s always interesting to ask “why now?” For example, for almost a decade, entrepreneurs tried to create video sharing services like YouTube, but only succeeded when certain key dependencies – broadband, digital video cameras, a version of Flash that “just worked” show all text

“the more freely information flows; the stronger that society becomes” President Obama http://tiny.cc/rh5b1 By allowing free conversation it is so easy to drop a link http://i.imgur.com/TD4Kq.jpg It would be ridiculous for an ISP to block the

TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde announced her departure today.
I’m so angry.
Drift back to the end of 2006. TechCrunch was a year and a half old. My hobby had turned into a business. Federated Media was selling our standard ads and sent a small check every month. Nik Cubrilovic had “invented” the notion of a 125 pixel square ad that we’d sell for a flat rate, which was an unqualified success and was quickly copied by everyone else. We had enough money to have a staff, and things were looking pretty show all text

Rep. Jason Chaffetz. Photo J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
(This post was updated at 2:55 p.m. EST to reflect new hearing date set for Wednesday.)
The House Judiciary Committee considering whether to send the Stop Online Piracy Act to the House floor abruptly adjourned Friday with no new vote date set — a surprise given that the bill looked certain to pass out of committee.
The committee’s chairman and chief sponsor of the legislation, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), agreed to further explore a show all text

FoxNews.com LIVE streaming every weekday from 9am ET -3pm ET. Breaking news from our Fox correspondents – in-depth coverage on our panel discussions. A powerful newscast exclusively online. Log on, stay in the loop and be a part of it all.

VideoImage via Wikipedia This post was written by Rob Siltanen, chairman and chief creative officer at Siltanen & Partners. Apple’s remarkable rise, coupled with Steve Jobs’ recent death, has prompted quite a few people to reflect on the historical impact of the “Think Different” ad campaign and the “To the crazy ones” commercial […]

SAY Media has acquired popular tech blog ReadWriteWeb. Founded in 2003 by Richard MacManus, ReadWriteWeb became one of the most-respected news sites in the tech world, establishing a voice that’s often more serious and in-depth than its competitors.

For something like seventeen years, I have been investing in entrepreneurs who have had the freedom to innovate on the Internet. It has been a powerful life lesson for me. These people imagine something, they create it, and they are off and running building a business, hiring employees, generating cash flow. They ask nobody for permission. They don't need any permits. They don't need any real estate. All they need is a server (now rented in the cloud from Amazon and others) and a laptop or two … show all text

Imagine a new hot-dog selling venture. Let’s also say there’s only one supplier to purchase hot dogs from. Instead of simply charging a fixed price for hot dogs, that supplier demands the HIGHER of the following: $1 per hot dog sold OR $2 for every customer served OR 50 percent of all revenues for anything sold in the store.In addition, the supplier requires a two-year minimum order of 300 hot dogs per day, payable all in advance. If fewer hot dogs are sold, there is no refund. If more than 300… show all text

Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by Penelope Trunk, writer and founder of Brazen Careerist. Her opinions are her own.
We need to get more guys who are running tech startups instead decide to be stay-at-home dads.
What do you think of that? Stupid, right? That’s what it sounds like when anyone suggests that we need to get more women doing startups.
If you are worried that women don’t feel capable of doing whatever they want, you can stop worrying. Women outperform men in school at su… show all text

Over the last two years, Apple has been engaged in vicious legal battles over smartphone patents, many of which are aimed at squelching (or squeezing money out of) manufacturers of devices running Android. And now, for some reason, it has given valuable patents to a patent troll — which is using them to sue many of the top technology companies in the world.
Meet Digitude Innovations, a firm based in Virginia that recently filed suit with the International Trade Commission alleging patent infrin… show all text

I have breast cancer. A week ago, I had breast cancer, and the week before that, and the week before that. Maybe five, eight, even ten years ago, the first bad cell split inside me, secretly. But I didn’t know. This is how I arrived at knowing.
Two friends of mine were recently diagnosed. When news of the first came, I felt sadness. When news of the second came a few weeks ago, I felt a different kind of shock. I’d never had a mammogram. Even though I was ten years younger than the time they say show all text

Non-techies find the @ and # symbols on Twitter don’t make much sense. So the company had to figure out a way to keep the site running for people who are more technologically adept and rely on these symbols but also work seamlessly for those who think these characters are substitutes for swear words in comics.

Two years after the Airbus 330 plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, Air France 447’s flight-data recorders finally turned up. The revelations from the pilot transcript paint a surprising picture of chaos in the cockpit that led to the crash.

As you know, we have been trying to buy Christmas presents for kids in the Regretsy community.
We took many applications, vetted them carefully and set about creating a giant gift exchange program, where you could buy a gift for the over 200 children we’re helping.
We raised so much money that we found ourselves in a position of not just being able to send toys, but to send a monetary gift to the families as well. We hoped it might help them make their holiday dinners more special, or maybe pay… show all text

It’s My StoryWhen I was growing up, what we knew about each other wasn’t called data. It was called interaction, stories, and information. It came in the form of experience and shared events, gossip and oral history, and reports and report cards. Not every story told about us was unbiased, accurate, or even true.
In my youngest years, my dad taught me three guiding principles about such stories:
Don’t believe anything you hear and only half of what you see.
Consider the reliability of the so… show all text

It hasn’t been a good year for Firefox. Mozilla has lost share to Google, it’s lost the loyalty of enterprise customers, and it’s lost key talent. And a deal with Google that supplied 84% of its revenue last year was scheduled to end in November. Can Firefox avoid a slide into irrelevance?